XT660R Heaven

Life on the road is fab...

Friday, 11 April 2014

a little bit of history...

Geoff & I first met in Pisa in Italy, we were down there looking to get our bikes under the good ole 'leaning tower' for a picture before heading over to Misano for the Moto GP that year. What a great race & what fab weather...

Geoff had already visited a couple of GP's that trip in Spain & was gonna see this one then head back to the UK & his family. My brother in law, Mark & I had come down for a ride & used the GP as a reason to come this far south... Geoff saw the UK plates on our bikes & called by, some pizza, a couple of beers & a ride plan was hatched for the next day...

When we met up, it was a beautiful sunny period with dry tarmac which we decided to make good use of by visiting Bologna & the Ducati Factory via the SP20, we never made it because the freshly laid tarmac we encountered was as near to perfect as we'd ever experienced & all three of us were so enthralled we just decided to ride until we were totally knackered!

We caught up with the guys laying the tarmac nearly at the end of the 100+ miles we'd ridden that day, we just had to stop & say a big thankyou, it was amazing, no traffic, no white lines... mmmm Italian perfection... even better than their women & that's saying something!! Sorry no photos, too busy riding :-)

Anyway after this trip we managed to do several trips together over the next few years, around Spain, around France, into Germany, Austria, back to Italy etc... even visiting Corsica as it was my spring & autumn commute to work for nearly nine years, (the roads here are amazing & the off road potential is superb!!), where Geoff educated me on how to ride a sports bike properly, at least a little anyway... (Geoff used to race, he was the side car monkey, the guy who jumped around on the back keeping the wheels on the tarmac whilst the rider gunned the shit out of the thing to win). On top of his 3 wheeled exploits he's also raced 400's that he built around various tracks in the UK... that & re-building multiple bikes over the years has given him an in-depth knowledge of all things two wheeled!! A bit of a god send for setting things up for this trip...

So to continue the story... we've ridden nearly a 100,000 miles together over the years now, all over Europe & the UK, Geoff has had a lot of bikes in this time but seems to have settled upon a Triumph Speed Triple of late for the road excursions... it's a bike he rebuilt & its a beaut, all lime green & very sexy...

Triumph Speed Triple

For me I had my good old RRW blade for around 5 years, I rode nearly 60k miles on it before scrapping it & now I have a 2001 GSXR 1000 K1 which has done nearly 30k miles & although the brakes are truly shite & it's not the really same colours as when I bought it, it's still going strong... the engines on these things are ace, bombproof, like all things Suzuki really!! It'll be time to change soon... mm what next??

Geoff's 955i & my old RRW bronze blade

Geoff's GSXR 1000 & my Old RRW Blade in Corsica

And now we have the XT's, where we're finding new ways to have fun & get upto mischief on two wheels!!